The Heart of the Matter: Understanding What Makes the Game Tick
Whenever I approach a new game, whether as a player, as a designer, or simply as an outside observer, I split my inquiry into two questions:
-How do people play the game?
-Why do people play the game?
To clarify what I mean by each of these:
How people play the game is the knowledge of how players choose to interact with the content of the game. Which cards do they add to their deck? Which units do they choose to put into their army? What moves or tactics do they put into play at the table? What strategies are dominant in the metagame - and what strategies are perceived to be dominant, whether or not the data supports that conclusion?
Why people play the game is the knowledge of what parts of the game experience bring and keep the player to the table. What do they get excited about having the chance to do in the game? Do they enjoy putting some skill into practice, such as remembering trivia, or judging probabilities, distances, or angles? Do they love bluffing, mind games, and feints? Do they get a visceral thrill out of rolling dice? Do they enjoy seeing a narrative unfold at the table?
Both of these questions are important to understanding a game from a developmental perspective, especially if it’s your job to expand upon that game. And if you’re not careful, it can be easy to conflate the two. In this article, I’ll go over why it’s important to understand the how and the why individually, a few ways this can be used to identify the heart of the game, and what you can do with that knowledge as a designer.
Part One
To discuss a concrete example of the divide between why and how games are played, let’s talk about good old Scrabble. First, a little context on how Scrabble is played.
Scrabble, as it is understood by most people, is a game of playing tiles to create words that score points. Play the highest-value words, win the game. However, if you’ve ever had the experience of playing Scrabble with someone who has dipped their toe into the waters of the competitive scene, you see quite a different game emerge. Most turns, instead of going for a large play, a skilled player will usually play small words, or even pass to churn tiles through their hand. Conservative, defensive play that forces the other players to engage with a very different sort of creativity than “what words can you think of with these letters?”
That’s because any large play has to be extremely worthwhile from a points perspective, as large plays “open” the board, creating more opportunities for opponents to score their own points. And the way the board is set up, being the first player to “open” the board is often disadvantageous, as another player can follow-up to hit an even higher-value bonus tile. In casual play, this serves as a catch-up mechanic in Scrabble - large plays are worth a lot of points, but they give your opponents the chance to make their own large plays. But when you turn to competitive games of Scrabble, it becomes apparent that it is more reliable to play defensively, denying your opponents the opportunity to score points than it is to go for big plays that create more big plays. “Closing” the board is a key tactic to winning, and if by doing so you can force your opponent to be the one to “open” the board, all the better.
Thus, a competitive player will seek to use small words to fill in blocks, which serves the dual purpose of scoring in multiple directions and preventing any other player from having their choice of spaces on which to hang a new word. The ideal board state is the one where your opponents can’t play anything without giving you access to the high-value resources on the board. And that is when a competitive player will go for a large play, generally with a word that exhausts their entire hand and hits a double or triple word score, or even scores in multiple directions. The core activity of the game, competitively, becomes less “what words can I play?” and more “how do I limit my opponent’s options to control the spaces on the board with the greatest value?”
None of this is to say that one means of play is better than the other - they just reflect two different expectations about the conventions of gameplay. In extreme cases, one means of play (usually the competitive one) might come to be seen as antithetical to fun overall, but I don’t believe this to be the case with competitive Scrabble, which is well-liked by its adherents. Of course, if your expectation is casual Scrabble and you wander into a competitively driven environment, you might not have a good time.
So, we have two different answers for the how.
Casual players (who comprise most of the player base) try to play the biggest word they can every turn.
Competitive players try to control board position to limit their opponents’ options or set up game-winning plays.
Part Two
Now let’s dig into the why.
When you observe how the game is played by the best players of the game, you see a game of tight map control and strategic awareness, not unlike go or chess. An experienced player will have all memorized a list of key words for specific situations from the player’s dictionary, so word knowledge and retrieval is a much smaller part of the game.
When you observe why the game is played across the spectrum (from casual to competitive), though, you’re likely to see something quite different. Most people play Scrabble to show off a knowledge of large or obscure words, to demonstrate creativity on the board by recontextualizing current words or letters for even bigger plays, and as a family bonding activity that cleverly disguises education in an enjoyable game.
And, in my observation of competitive games, even most of the people who play Scrabble competitively probably sought out that game in particular because they liked the experience of stretching their vocabulary. After all, if they wanted a game of pure spatial awareness and strategy, there are no shortage of options for great games that don’t include memorizing long lists of how best to dump a “Z.” The way they play the game might not reflect that original motive at first glance, but it was still core to the original appeal - the heart of the experience. There are probably some players who jumped directly into the competitive mindset of an area control game, but most people probably didn’t end up playing Scrabble that way. They first showed up for the wordplay. And the reason they first showed up remains important to them, even if it’s not reflective of how they’re playing now.
Part Three
So let’s imagine you were working on an expansion to Scrabble. Imagine further that the expansion was intended to appeal to both the competitive and general audiences (and let’s handwave whether or not this would in reality be the most commercially viable product to make).
In setting out to design an expansion to Scrabble, even one intended for competitive players, a designer who looked only at how Scrabble is played competitively would miss a key part of the picture. New mechanics that interacted with spacing and scoring mechanics would likely be the obvious place to expand in that case - after all, that is what competitive players do with the game. But is that what players, even competitive players, want to be doing? In my observation of games, mechanics that pushed Scrabble further toward an area control game would not be received well by a majority of the casual or competitive base. By contrast, even competitive players would generally respond positively to mechanics that made words or spelling important, provided those mechanics did not invalidate the emergent behaviors like “opening” and “closing” the board that they have accepted into their repertoire or make their existing pool of knowledge useless. Even mechanics that seem pretty wild on paper might well land with the competitive base while seemingly “safer” mechanics that interacted more with the demonstrated emergent behaviors might be rejected because they diminish the focus on the core of the game.
The importance of emphasizing the why in design is visible in the Scrabble successors that have shown staying power. Upwords allows stacking of letters, freeing up the board to a much greater degree than Scrabble, while the popular “Scribble” fan-game (later sold under the title Bananagrams) removes the shared board entirely, having each player play solely in their own sphere without interference from others. These are, at first glance, radical changes to the gameplay (indeed, these are enough to justify these being separate games). But the core appeal of constructing words creatively on a grid, building structures with future moves in mind, and flexing one’s vocabulary while doing so, are preserved, so these games generally appeal to large chunks of the Scrabble crowd.
Part Four
To jump to a concrete example of this phenomenon: during my years working on X-Wing, I experimented with a lot of different mechanics that built upon existing parts of the game. One thing that I quickly learned that players strongly disliked any mechanic that relied on randomness. And I found this interesting, because in addition to being a convention of miniatures games at large, randomness is already enshrined as important part of X-Wing’s core experience, through the dice and the damage deck. Probability calculation and risk assessment is a key skill for any top-tier player. Yet any new mechanic that added randomness in places it previously didn’t exist got a very chilly reaction. Even if the effect had a high enough expected value in its outcome that players chose to use it, few would report that they enjoyed using it. When unsuccessful, it felt like a waste; when successful, it felt “unearned.” By contrast, some of my strangest ideas from the first waves I worked on, like blowing up asteroids (Seismic Torpedo) or dropping new debris clouds (Rigged Cargo Chute), were quite well-received despite seeming at first blush to be unprecedented. These ideas seemed risky on paper - like stacking letters in Scrabble, they did things outside the usual conventions players thought of when they considered how they play the game. But these concepts pushed people back toward thinking about the fact that they were flying their ships, rather than simply calculate odds of dice outcomes. And it turns out that one of these activities is tied directly to the heart of the game, its core fantasy, and the other is something that players had accepted they would need in order to live out that core fantasy in a competitive environment.
Like with Scrabble, playing the game competitively requires certain skills (probability assessment and gambling on outcomes). But neither the calculation of probabilities nor the thrill of rolling dice are activities that engage the fantasy of a majority of players, even among competitive players who do these activities often. The inclusion of calculated risks is also important for the game itself, as predictability breeds stagnation - the game needs uncertainty to be fun. And rolling dice and seeing it pay out (or not) can be fun at times by providing a wild swing that takes the game’s narrative in an unexpected direction. But the mechanical importance of uncertainty does not actually indicate an experiential centrality of randomness to X-Wing; the need for uncertainty could be filled in other ways without damaging the core of the game. Nor does the amount of player energy spent on understanding and reducing randomness actually indicate a widespread enjoyment of these activities in this particular game. Most players aren’t interested in seeing these mechanics dramatically expanded beyond the level at which they are necessary, compared with those that reward them for engaging with the heart of the game. Effects that change the setup of the board directly affect a player’s decision-making in an interesting way. And that’s the heart of X-Wing: the fantasy of flying a starship through dangerous debris and navigational hazards while facing down foes. When a new game element helps a player feel more like they’re a pilot in a cockpit making daring maneuvers and less like they’re standing at a table calculating odds on dice, most players like it.
Part Five
An easy trap to fall into, as a designer approaching a game, is to conflate the means by which a game is played with the reason it is played. This risk is especially significant when approaching a long-lived game that has grown alongside its player base. The player base, especially the competitive player base, will spend most of its energy discussing elements of the game that may or may not actually factor into why they are playing the game in the first place.
Of course, this isn’t to diminish the importance of knowing how a game is played at various levels. If anything, understanding why a game is played makes the knowledge of how it is played more useful and important - equipped with both, a designer can create content that both scaffolds the core experience and is actually used by the competitive portion of the base. Knowing why the game is played without leveraging how it is played in your design won’t actually get the players to engage with the parts of the game they enjoy, it will simply lead to a glut of content nobody really uses. That’s probably a topic worthy of its own future article. And while there is certainly a place for polarizing elements like “bad cards” (or other niche or suboptimal content), a significant portion of content still needs to land with a majority of people for a game to thrive.
So the lesson can be put simply as this: don’t just look at what players are doing, look at what they want to be doing. And beyond observing, ask them what they want to be doing. Play the game yourself and ask “What did I want to be doing?” Use this information to identify the heart of the game, and the core fantasy of the majority of players, then design to enable that experience. This experience will vary game-to-game, and may not be what the original designer envisioned, especially when dealing with a game with a long lifespan.
As a final note, this lesson is a bit less neat to study when designing a wholly new game rather than expanding upon an existing framework, but is no less important. The how will be extremely slippery - you’ll constantly be changing the how through the iterative decisions you make. This makes a clear vision of the why all the more important throughout the entire design process.